Welcome to our Virtual book tour stop of "Wicked Lies" by Karina Cooper brought to you by Bewitching Book Tours.

1. Tell us three things about yourself that we may not be able to find on your website.

a. I want a dog. Like, I really, really want a dog. I’ve got my eye on a white shepherd, and in my fantasies, he’ll hang out with me, keeping my feet warm, while I write on cold days. In the big house that doesn’t exist yet. ...What?

b. I have fallen in love with Mumford & Sons, which tends to make me feel like I’m older than I am. It’s a small pay-off for the way the music makes me feel. Er, aside from old and cranky, I mean.

c. If I had my way, I’d remake the world in the image of Lost Girl, or a similar urban fantasy. I’d still be a writer inside it, but I’d also have extra powers. Although even as I say that, a part of me remains convinced that if life was a book, I’d never be more than a support character. Do you suppose main characters feel this way, too?

2. What does a typical writing day look for you?

Writing! Still! You know, the last time I answered this question, I think I appalled myself with my schedule. It’s only gotten worse. Since the mancandy now works a night shift, I get up around 10am, start working—writing or administrative business—and I pretty much work straight through ‘til he gets home at midnight. It’s kind of insane, and maybe I should see somebody about that...

3. Tell us a little bit about "Wicked Lies" and why readers should check it out?

Wicked Lies is Jonas Stone’s story, told just after the events of Sacrifice the Wicked. It’s the story of a man who’s spent his life lying to those he loves—putting on a front so that his friends, the only family he’s ever known, don’t worry about him, making sure that their needs have always come first. It’s Avon Impulse’s first LGBTQ novella, featuring two men as the central love story, and it’s very near and dear to my heart. If you like seeing a good man find love, even despite his own demons, then you’ll love seeing two.

4. What inspired you to write the novella, "Wicked Lies"?

This did. The cause, like I said, is very near and dear to my heart. It seems like every day, there’s another article out there, another retweet. Something someone said that chips another piece from the self-esteem of someone else just because they’re different from what politicians and adults who should know better call “normal”. Because a man loves another man, or a woman loves another woman; because a child has questions about his or her own identity, there are those who take this as a sign that they need to step in and “fix” the problem—and the damage it causes is often more lasting, deeper, bloodier than anyone wants to understand.
I wrote Wicked Lies because that kind of uncertainty, the sense of worth hammered down by others, is one of those things that Jonas Stone has struggled with for his whole career. Who he is outside of his role as “tech support” has never been clear to him, and he’s never let himself consider that until that role was forcibly stripped from him. I wanted him to have the chance at love that I want everyone to have, gay or straight or anything in between.

5. How many books are planned for the Dark Mission Series?

All in all, there will be 5 fulls and 3 novellas. The final Dark Mission book, One for the Wicked, comes out shortly after Wicked Lies,a nd that will take us through the finale. Will the witches find a place in New Seattle? Will they lose it all? What is that dastardly scheme all about, anyway? And will Simon survive to see it?

6. What has been the easiest and hardest scene to write in the series so far?

The easiest scenes had to be the sex scenes. I mean, when you have that much passion for someone, letting it go pretty much, well, writes itself. I enjoy writing those, because I really get to push boundaries—both mine and my characters’. The hardest, though? The hardest scenes are the ones that happen between the action. These often have subtler goals that don’t get in your face like bullets or sex does, and I have to really go over them to make sure that I’m not just glossing things over to get to the next thrill ride. My most favorite difficult scene was in Blood of the Wicked, when Silas inevitably learns that Jessie is a witch—his enemy. It’s raw, aggressive, and heart-breakingly violent, which I really wanted to showcase because it was such an indicator of Silas’ life until then.

7. Who designs the covers to the Dark Mission series? (They are ALL drool worthy)

I love them, too! The covers are designed by the Avon art department, and they really, really are wonderful. I have been blessed by the cover gods!

8. Fun question: If you could travel back in time, what era would you go and why?

Right now, I’m feeling like I’d go back to the Edo Period, Japan. I’m currently fascinated by the romanticized view of the samurai, the initially isolationist and then increasingly modernizing movements, and the gorgeous artistry that came out of the era. That the end of the Edo Period overlaps with the Victorian Era is only coincidence... Ahem.

9. What is up next for Karina Cooper?

Next up is the final book in the Dark Mission series, One for the Wicked. That’ll be a fun one to watch people read, although nerve-wracking! After that, The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway—another charity novella benefitting Make a Wish—will be serenading a new partnership: my St. Croix Chronicles series moves to Carina Press, and will be followed in September by Corroded, the third in the series. All in all, I have so many projects and I can’t wait to show them to you!

10. Do you have anything specific you would like to say to your readers?

Specifically? I have this to say to everyone: Never give up, never surrender. Whatever dreams you have, whatever loves you carry, whatever turns you on, they’re part of who you are. Never apologize for loving, dreaming, and working to achieve your goals.

If I had slowed down, turned back, or listened to the others who told me I shouldn’t do what I’m doing now, I never would have made it here. I found someone who supported me, and because sometimes it’s as simple as that, this is for you: I support you.

Now get out there and make your dreams come true. You can do it; it gets better.

All my love— K.

The DARK MISSION series so far….

The streets of New Seattle have become a battleground between the Holy Order's agents and the witches persecuted in the name of "keeping of the peace". Battle-lines are shifting, good and evil not nearly so clear-cut as witches and rogue hunters have banded together in an uncertain alliance with rebels determined to peel back layers of conspiracy that go back decades before the cataclysm that changed the world forever. The Order has made its move, overthrowing the city government in a bloody coup, and present-viewer Jessie, ex-hunter Silas, newly minted witch Naomi, the felon Phin Clarke, seer Caleb and genetically enhanced witch Juliet are suddenly thrown together with the displaced Mission Director Parker Adams and Simon, a double-agent whose witch genes are slowly killing him. The rebels need to gain some ground, get back their imprisoned people, or this will be the shortest rebellion in history.

Jonas Stone has been given
his first independent operation: rescue the insurrection leader’s imprisoned
grandson from the Mission. Getting the job done means more than getting Danny
Granger out-it means staying with him while he heals. Staying too close, for
way too long.

Danny is everything Jonas
isn’t: confident, optimistic, honest--a man to be reckoned with. If only it
didn’t mean going against everything Jonas has planned. He’s kept his secrets
for years, hid behind a mask no one could see through...until now. Danny isn’t
the kind of man Jonas deserves. But he might be exactly the man he needs...

Dedication:

For my Uncle Stephen. You
were the first man in my life who bravely came out to me, and who paved the way
for me to be myself. I loved you so much before, and I love you just as much
now.

You are my inspiration.

And for every gay, lesbian,
bi-, trans-, queer, and questioning youth out there. Life can be hard,
sometimes it can get mean. There will be days when you feel like it’s
impossible, but I want you to know that there are people like me out here who support
you. I promise : it gets better.

Chapter One

A
blue-white light flickered in the dark. Sparks glinted off the tool racks
bolted to the wall across the shadowed room, reflected from the metal braces
left leaning against the desk. As silence—mind-numbingly loud, thick as water,
and twice as hard to breathe—filled the narrow room, that blue-white light
caught in the circular lenses of a pair of glasses and threw a glare across the
screen.

Jonas Stone stirred. “It has to be
now,” he said, his voice too loud in the oppressive weight of the shadows
behind him. He couldn’t look away from the feed spilling its incandescent glow
over his desk, his keyboard.

His conscience.

Because the man framed in that
digital feed—the kid strapped to the chair dead center of the
surveillance footage—wasn’t the first suspected heretic to sit there. To sweat
there.

To bleed.

“Be sure, Jonas. We get one shot at
this.”

His brain wanted to look at the
comm unit beside his left hand. His body refused to obey, every cell focused on
the prisoner’s dark, drooping head. Scarred fingers twitched, knuckles
whitening, and Jonas frowned as he realized his right hand had closed into a
painful fist.

It had to be now. The kid wouldn’t
last much longer.

“There’s no alternative,” he
replied. “We’re not going to get another opening soon enough to .” He
hesitated.

The voice over the comm link didn’t
waver. Not even a fracture. “Soon enough to save him.”

Only through recent experience did
Jonas know that the raspy, lifetime-pack-a-day voice coming out of the secure
line belonged to a woman named May. Leader of a rebellion that had saved
Jonas’s life, and the perpetrator behind a string of hacking jobs that left
Jonas seriously reconsidering a career shift before the Church had made that
choice for him.

The fact that she was very, very
good was all that kept him from throwing in the towel now.

But he’d never met her in person.
Hell, he’d never met the prisoner now struggling to raise his head in Jonas’s
feed, either. Instead, all he had was a picture in a box, a hacked security
feed, and too many hours spent staring at the incandescent screen until his
eyeballs throbbed and the vicious curl of helplessness inside him turned to a
spiraling ache.

That boy didn’t belong in that kind
of interrogation room.

A single light, faded blue, gleamed
over shoulders broader than Jonas’s, but not by much. The prisoner was
athletically lean where Jonas was simply skinny. The narrowly defined muscles
of his chest were outlined by the stained remains of a thin, long-sleeve
shirt. Blood and sweat had turned it
nearly brown. His slumped shoulders strained against the restraints confining
him to the hard metal chair, a position not just awkward but painful as hell.
Jonas hadn’t seen his face for over an hour.

He didn’t have to. He knew what
he’d see when—if—the kid raised his chin again.

Blood caked into a ridged scab
across the fine slash of his upper lip, under his broad nose and over a
determinedly sculpted chin. He’d see the blackened stains of it dried into the
man’s ears, blending into his dark brown hair. Even now, that greasy fringe
flopped over his forehead, long since sweating off the gel that had held it
into its fashionable spikes. The longest of the textured strands would slide
into one swollen eye, if it ever opened again.

The prisoner had eyes the color of
the computer-lit confines of the places Jonas preferred to inhabit. Almost
black, even without pain stripping them to an endless void. When open, those
eyes all but crackled with an intensity that could take a lesser man’s
objectivity away in a single glance. Like a hungry kid or a kicked puppy.

Or a man on the edge of
desperation.

Jonas’s chest kicked.

“Let me know when your people are
ready.” He didn’t bother hiding the raw regret in his voice. He’d felt a lot of
it, lately. After all, he used to be the man who helped put people into rooms
just like that.

“Fine.” May’s voice cracked.
Flattened. “I’m trusting you, Jonas.”

“I know.” They always did. “Let me
try. I’m positive I can get him out. They won’t expect it this soon.”

Born from the genetic mash-up
of lesser royalty, storytellers, wanderers and dreamers, KARINA COOPER was
destined to be a creative genius. As a child, she moved all over the country
like some kind of waifish blonde gypsy and thrived in the new cultures her
family settled in. When she (finally) grew up, she skipped the whole genius
part and fell in love with writing because, really, who doesn’t love making
things up for a living?

One part romance fanatic, one
part total dork, and all imagination, she writes dark and sexy paranormal
romance and urban fantasy. When she isn’t writing, Karina is an airship
captain’s wife and Steampunk fashionista. She lives in the beautiful and rainy
Pacific Northwest with a husband, four cats, two rabbits, the fantasy of a dog,
and a passel of adopted gamer geeks.

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In accordance with FTC guidelines for bloggers and endorsements, we would like to clarify that the books reviewed on Book Lovin' Mamas are either purchased/borrowed by us or provided by the publisher/author free of charge. We also receive copies of ARCs from Netgalley and Edelweiss. We are neither compensated for our reviews nor our opinions influenced in any way.